On Thursday, the Times of London hailed the G8’s agreement to kick the carbon can down the road (yet again) as an “historic breakthrough.”
Today, CCNet’s Benny Peiser has a piece in the Financial Post discussing this “historic agreement” to do nothing — a celebrated inaction he expects to see repeated at Copenhagen later this year:
Of course, the Copenhagen climate meeting is likely to produce an agreement — just like the Major Economies Forum cobbled one together in L’Aquila. It will, most likely, comprise of fine words and lofty promises, including the pledge that any future warming — should warming commence again at some point in the future — will be limited to no more than a moderate rise of 2C. And as always with climate conferences of this nature, the Copenhagen agreement will be hailed as a historic breakthrough in the fight to save the planet.
The G8 summit provided a good example of this traditional form of celebration. Its political promises, however, are often not worth the paper on which they are printed. . . .
By 2050, the combined population of China and India will have grown to a staggering three billion people. By then, most Chinese and Indians will have adopted an urban lifestyle, with cars, air conditioning, refrigerators, televisions and computers. This rate of population and economic growth together with the most extraordinary rise in energy demand makes any hope of medium-term emission reductions redundant.
All Western efforts to coerce these emerging countries into a legally binding climate treaty are prone to failure because the nations whose emissions count most — China and India —will continue to reject, categorically, any mandatory caps on their rapidly rising emissions. To counter Western pressure, India and China (in close partnership with other emerging nations) have raised their demands to such levels that they are effectively impossible to accept. They have told their Western counterparts that unless the G8 signs up to cut emissions by at least 40% by 2020, they would not commit to any emissions targets.
In addition, they are calling for new funding commitments from developed countries to spend up to 1% of their GDP on climate mitigation and adaptation — amounting to up to $200-billion per year. It is hard to see that the West, battered by the worst economic crisis since the Second World War, would ever agree to such a wealth transfer to its chief competitors — even in good times.
In short, it would appear that after years of inflamed global warming alarm, we are beginning to see a period of sobering-up, where national interests and economic priorities are overriding environmental concerns and utopian proposals.